Seems like Bambu Lab has a new trick for reducing waste. Rather than a toolchanger like the Prusa XL or the Snapmaker, they’re swapping just the nozzle. As far as I can tell from the video, the printer still has a second nozzle which won’t swap in and out, meaning a print can be run with 7 nozzles (six from the Vortek system, plus the second nozzle in the toolhead). So if you’re using 7 or fewer filaments, no pooping is necessary.
The cool bit here is that they’re using wireless chips in the nozzles to communicate the thermistor data to the printer, so no pin-based connections are needed.
Pretty cool solution, I think. I assume you’d still need a prime tower, but that’s a small amount of waste if they’re eliminating poop from purging the nozzles.
I’m curious to see how they’ll handle calibration, surely the nozzles aren’t all going to be perfectly aligned all the time.
Who cares? Bambu is proprietary shit that betrayed the community. Nobody should use their products, ever.
Who do you like instead?
Anybody who uses regular open-source firmware and doesn’t try to circumvent copyleft, and especially ones who actively give back to the community. Prusa, Creality, Elegoo, etc. Also, DIY/non-commercial projects like Voron.
I’ve been a big Elegoo fan for a while now. Love my Centauri Carbon! But even Elegoo is starting to go the enshitefication route, with the new printers no longer being open source.
What has Creality given the community? A desk full of printer designs that never met promise? I’ve got three.
They haven’t really given anything, but they haven’t tried to take anything away, either. They fall under the clause in my previous comment before the “especially” part.
I’m personally keeping an eye on Prusa. They’re working on a new multi-filament system for their new Core One printer and it might be worth the wait.
It is pricier because it is made in Europe but at least the company has a solid reputation for quality, repairability, consumer respect, and more ethical business practices than whatever enshitification hell Bambu is heading down the road towards.
Be aware that old Joe Prusa even says that open source printing is dead at this point.
So I would expect to see even Prusa locking their new ideas away behind patents.
Not to be that guy but prusa’s latest is not fully open source either
If you’re talking about the MMU3 it’s the same solution they’ve had for their other printers. The only “new” part is the mounting hardware for the Core One. I have one and it’s awesome, but it’s not new.
They announced that they were working on a new system that would depart from the MMU3 for the core one.
Do you have a source for this? All I could find is information about the MMU3.
It’s mentioned in one of their official videos about the core one on their YouTube channel. They really should put it on their website in written.
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Sounds kinky